Thomas Lynch reads
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What sort of morning was Euclid having when he first considered parallel lines? Or that business about how things equal to the same thing are equal to each other? Who’s to know what the day has in it? This morning Burt took it into his mind to make a long bow out of Osage orange and went on eBay to find the cow horns from which to fashion the tips of the thing. You better have something to pass the time, he says, stirring his coffee, smiling. And Murray is carving a model truck from a block of walnut he found downstairs. Whittling away he thinks of the years he drove between Detroit and Buffalo delivering parts for General Motors. Might he have nursed theorems on lines and dots or the properties of triangles or the congruence of adjacent angles? Or clearing customs at Niagara Falls, arrived at some insight on wholes and parts or an axiom involving radii and the making of circles, how distance from a center point can be both increased endlessly and endlessly split—a mystery whereby the local and the global share the same vexations and geometry? Possibly this is where God comes into it, who breathed the common notion of coincidence into the brain of that Alexandrian over breakfast twenty-three centuries back, who glimpsed for a moment that morning the sense it all made: life, killing time, the elements, the dots and lines and angles of connection— an egg’s shell opened with a spoon, the sun’s connivance with the moon’s decline, Sophia the maidservant pouring juice; everything, everything coincides, the arc of memory, her fine parabolas, the bend of a bow, the curve of the earth, the turn in the road.